Erin Harer

The burden usually lurking in my bones is hung around my neck in the form of my mother’s pearls. The thought that there are thirteen of them, and not twelve, consumes the space in my mind that I should be using to fasten my hair away from my face. But if I do, the matching set of earrings will make it fifteen pearls, and not fourteen, which is also unacceptable, so I wear my black hair long, even though it hides the white lace details on the back of my dress.

Alone in my childhood bedroom, I smile at the woman in the mirror, hoping to get a glimpse of who I always assumed I would be on my wedding day. I look like her, fair skinned, innocent eyed, gently loved, but I don’t feel like her. I am not innocent. In fact, I am the worst kind of person. The kind people live in fear of becoming.

Resisting the urge to touch my face, I place my hands on the vanity to steady myself against a string of disturbing thoughts and when I find my balance again, I choose red lipstick over the nearby bottle of pills. Not today. I deserve to remember today.

My lips are still sticky when the inevitable evil springs forward from the depths of my mind. I strain to decipher her voice from my own, but if truth had a voice, it would sound like hers.

“You deserve to die. How can you let Sam marry you? You’re disgusting. Selfish. Everyone waiting for you to walk down the aisle would be better off without you. You’re a burden. A worthless burden.”

Drawing on years of practice, I search for a memory that can break the stream of abuse. I find one of Sam. It’s always Sam. Sam holding me and telling me this voice is a liar. That if I trust anything, trust him. Even when I can’t trust myself. His words feel untrue but I hold his golden eyes in my mind, and I hope beyond reason that I truly am the woman he sees and not the one who wants me dead.

I open the bedroom door and step into the hallway, resisting the urge to knock on the door frame three times. I just have to make it down the stairs and out the back door to the wedding. I make it to the stairs with no problem and lift my white dress, exposing ankles that itch for a sensation I can’t give them right now. The process of getting down the stairs won’t allow it.

I tap each step just right, using only my toes, scrunched together so there is equal amounts of pressure on all five. I make it down three steps, then four, when I bravely take a step in the way a normal person would. I don’t have to live like this. I take another, imagining my life with Sam, days from now, swimming in the Caribbean on our honeymoon. Immediately, an image of Sam drowning throws me back, expanding my ribcage, and I dry heave under the pressure. The voice is coming again, stronger, wavering on the cusp of ruining everything.

“If you don’t make it downstairs and open the back door just right, Sam will die,” the voice says.

That’s not true. People walk down the stairs everyday and no one dies.

The space in my chest where I keep my memories grows shallow, leaving Sam on the other side of my madness, waiting in anguish, praying not to die. There are 14 steps and my foot trembles, reaching for the sixth one. Tap it just right. No. Try again. Tap it just right. No. Try again. Tap it just right. Tap it just right. Damn it! I breathe three times to reset while Sam’s face is blue in my mind, suffocating and panicked.

“Sarah!” he garbles my name through soaked lungs.

I have to make it down the stairs just right or he will die on our honeymoon. There is nothing I can do about it. It has already been decided by a force greater than myself. All I can do is try to prevent it. Back at the top of the stairs, I begin again. Tap it just right. No. Try again. Tap it just right. No. Try again.

The top steps show more wear than the others, making them more difficult to manage than the rest. If I can get to the eighth step, I am usually home free, but loss of momentum sends me back to the top, again and again, while our chosen people are gathered on the back lawn, safe from what I know. Sam is likely already doomed but if I can get downstairs to the back door, I can change that, and so I begin again. Tap it just right. Tap it just right. I can save him. Tap it just right. We can have a life together. Even like this. Tap it just right. I am in the zone and fight the urge to look down, to breathe wrong, to break pace. Tap it just right.

The floorboards creak in the foyer, breaking my concentration. No! No! No! Not now! Tap it just right.

“Sarah?”

I am frozen, unable to look up to see Sam at the foot of the stairs.

“Are you stuck?” Sam asks.

“I’m coming,” I say, but I am stuck, paralyzed, knowing that if he dies, we both die, because I won’t have a reason to stay. I won’t deserve to stay. Tap it just right!

“How many times have you tried this time?”

“I don’t know.” More than I was supposed to.

Sam leaps up the stairs, skipping every other one until he’s by my side.

“Here, let me help you,” he says.

“I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about. Can I touch you?”

“Yes.”

I try to straighten my dress but he pulls me in.

“You’re not supposed to see me before the wedding, let alone have to ask to touch me.”

“I can see you whenever I want.” He kisses my forehead.

“But it’s bad luck. You have no idea what that means for me.” 

He takes my face in his hands. “Yes I do.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“Yes you do.”

“You can’t marry me.”

“Yes I can.”

Sam searches my face the way he does right before he asks my least favorite question. “Did you take your meds?”

“I don’t know,” I lie.

He glides past me and returns with a pill bottle.

“It makes me foggy. I wanted to remember today.”

“Here.” Sam puts the pill in my shaking hand.

“I think if I can just make it down the stairs…” I stop myself and let the sight of him in his black tuxedo overwhelm me. In all my years I never dreamed someone like him would be standing before me, ready to love me, even like this.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

“Yes. Even when I can’t trust myself.”

“Then take the pill, Babe.”

I close my eyes and crunch it up with my front teeth, grateful for the bitter taste that precedes relief.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I’ve got you. Always.”

We sit down together on step seven, half way between the past and the rest of our lives.

“Are you really ready for a life with this?” I ask.

“Are you really ready for a life with this?” He smiles and makes 

a sweeping motion across his body.

“Shut up. You’re annoyingly perfect.”

His face softens and I fall into the comfort of his gaze.

“Sarah. If it means a life with you, I ache for a life with this.”

“See. That’s what I’m talking about.” I exhale sharply through my nose and press my forehead to his. 

There’s a loud clang in the kitchen and the voices of caterers. 

“You should go. Everyone is waiting.”

“They’ll wait.”

“But…”

He hushes me. “Everyone will wait.”

“My pill will take time to sink in.”

“Then we wait as long as it takes.”

It takes seventeen minutes to break through the wall between our opposing realities. Sam’s voice fills most of it, recounting the reasons he loves me, the moment he knew for sure, the first time we kissed, the feeling he had when I said, “yes.” He waits with me until I am ready, his words filling in the cracks in my broken thoughts.

“You still want to marry me?” I ask.

“Even more than I did this morning.”

“I don’t deserve…”

He stops me. “Did you ever consider it’s me that doesn’t deserve you?”

A smile fights its way to the surface and I give in to it as Sam leads me down the stairs to the back door. I feel like the woman in the mirror, the one filled with grace, perfect in her mother’s pearls.

“Can you open the door?” he asks.

I take a deep breath and turn the knob. I don’t turn it just right or knock on the door frame, I just open it and let the afternoon sun light my face and set Sam’s eyes aglow. I take the first step. I don’t tap it just right. I just take it.